Digital marketing is an essential part of doing business in 2021. Yet, so many businesses and marketers are just scraping by with so-so strategy or no real strategy at all. Over time, this leads to more work, less return, and some understandable frustration.
It’s time for a fresh start. You need a winning digital marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll walk you through the core tenets of this strategy and what you need to think about and do ahead of launching your website or marketing campaigns.
Who are your customers? If you’re unable to provide a succinct and informed answer to that question, you’ll want to start here before you do anything else. Digital marketing is rarely successful when marketers don’t know who their customers are or what they want. It creates an insincerity that permeates through everything: web design, social media posts, videos, and more. And it all results in subpar performance.
You don’t have to take every one of the business’ customers out to lunch to pick their brain. Just survey them. Ask them why they decided to work with the business, what they were originally looking for, and what about their ads, website, or social media posts worked—or didn’t work—for them. Then, pair this survey data with what you’re seeing in Google Analytics, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of the business’ customers.
Every decision you make should be run through several customer personas. Group similar surveys together to start constructing these personas. It often helps to give them a name and biographical information, but what’s most important is that you think about your digital marketing in reference to who they are and what they want. For instance, if a majority of your customers like shopping on their phones but think your mobile site needs work, that’s a logical starting place for your efforts.
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Just a few years ago, most businesses could get away with just having a website or—if they were advanced—a website and a Facebook account. Now, that limited-scope approach just isn’t going to cut it. Your digital marketing strategy needs to be diverse and account for multiple channels: videos, business listings, paid ads, display ads, and many more.
If you’re tackling each of these individually, you’re going to end up wasting a lot of time. Take a step back and instead look at them as being interconnected. That video you put all that time into editing isn’t just for YouTube. It can be used in social media posts, added to a business listing, featured on the website, or included on a landing page.
You might have heard the expression, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” It’s true here, too! Improve your business’ listings, and you’ll funnel more traffic to your website and lower your bounce rate. Make your core pages more conversion-friendly, and you’ll lower the cost-per-lead for your ads. If you want to start winning, you’re going to need to take this multi-pronged approach.
That large digital marketing ecosystem tends to stretch digital marketers a bit thin. Trying to hold onto the reins of all those products and data, all at once, is just too much for any individual person. Automation is the key to reducing your total workload and making the whole thing manageable.
First, work to automate anything tedious or especially time-consuming. This includes data collection, building reports, and more. If you hate doing it because it’s boring, it’s the perfect candidate to be automated. From there, analyze your daily routine and figure out what you can do to make your life easier. If you’re sending the same exact email, every single day, either automate it using software or at least turn it into a template.
If you embrace automation and take the time to work it into your processes, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.
So far, we’ve covered the basics. If you’re ready to get into the weeds and take your marketing strategy to the next level, check out this infographic.
Author Bio
Raluca Crasuleac is the senior editor and digital marketing strategist at 5 Fold Marketing, an online advertising company. Raluca has completed her Bachelor’s in Marketing at ASU and has adventured into studying foundational neuroscience at Duke University on Coursera. By combining her marketing knowledge with her neuroscience insights, Raluca has a better understanding on how consumers make buying decisions thus having the unique ability to create innovative digital marketing strategies and drive business success.
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